Users face difficulties in reading textual web content displayed through their browsers when the font size of the content is small. This problems is especially prevalent on mobile computing devices such as smartphones. Mobile computing devices typically have smaller screens than stationary computers, and thus mobile browsers tend to use smaller fonts to display web content.
A single web site can contain content that includes multiple font sizes. The ranges of font sizes used also vary from site to site. Compounding these issues, different users prefer reading fonts of different sizes. Whereas some users might be perfectly comfortable reading relatively small fonts (e.g., 8 point), other users have different standards and tolerances for the font size they are most comfortable reading (e.g., 12 point, 18 point, etc.), based on eye sight, personal preference and other factors.
Some conventional web browsers support zooming in and out, thereby allowing the user to increase and decrease the displayed size of the content currently on the screen. This can be useful for reading a specific block of text that is too small to view comfortably, but because the text size varies on individual web sites, the user must keep zooming in and out while scrolling through the site. When the user then browses to a different site, the user is again required to keep adjusting the level of magnification provided by the zoom feature to maintain the desired font size while scrolling through displayed text on that site. The need to keep adjusting the level of zoom is not convenient, and is generally burdensome on the user.
Some conventional browsers also allow users to set a minimum font size option, which then adjusts the text of a web page such that the smallest font on the page is displayed at the specified minimum size, and larger fonts are displayed at larger sizes. However, because parts (often the majority) of a given page are not visible on the screen at any given time, the specified minimum font size is often applied to a font not currently on the screen (i.e., the smallest font in the page). When this occurs, all of the fonts that are currently displayed are increased to a size above the minimum, thus resulting in screenfulls of text where all the displayed fonts are larger than necessary. This wastes screen space, and has the effect of displaying less of the web page at a time than the user actually wants, based on the user's desired font size.
It would be desirable to address these issues.